EFF names W Cape candidates

Cape Town-140324. The EFF (Western Cape branch) announced the W.Cape list of candidates for the 2014 Provincial Elections at the Ritz Hotel this morning. From left in the front row: Commissar Bernard Joseph, Commissar Nazier Paulsen(Premier Candidate) and Commissar Veronica Mente. reporter:Warda Meyer.Photo: jason boud

Cape Town -

A lecturer, provincial government employees, former ANC members and a trade unionist are all on the Economic Freedom Fighters Western Cape list of candidates.

The party announced on Monday that Nazier Paulsen would be its Western Cape premier candidate for the May 7 elections.

Paulsen, a software engineering and project management lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, was voted in at the party's elective conference in January.

“These men and women form part of the new revolutionary provincial government that will lead our people to better prosperity,” he said. Candidates had been selected on the basis of their integrity.

“None of the members who joined this party joined to be on a candidate list. We are here to serve the people and only the people. Because we are still a new party, we had input from the national leadership. It was sort of a filter-down process, but most of the candidates are from the province,” he said.

Paulsen said his election campaign would focus on informal settlements, schools affected by gang violence, and land. “We have too many informal settlements in the province. There is land available all over the province - why can it not be utilised?

“It’s because the majority of the land belongs to the capitalists. We believe in land appropriation and it’s what we will be pushing in Parliament.”

Bernard Joseph, a former Cope member and a Community Safety Department employee, said he had joined the party to implement “its radical change”.

Joseph is third on the party’s candidate list.

“I moved to the EFF from Cope, where there was no leadership and no movement. At the EFF we have a vibrant team of young and old men and women determined to take the province forward.

“The DA in the Western Cape is doing exactly what the ANC is doing at the national government level,” he said.

Former ANC and SACP member Veronica Mente, who is second on the list, said: “I stand for the change the EFF wants to bring about in the country. That change will be radical. In the Western Cape, we have a gang problem, and the state of township schools is dire. We will focus on that.”